Abstract
To understand the political dimension of dissident legacies, we need first to understand the components that “made” the dissidents and follow their reconfiguration after 1989, leading to initial empowerment followed by gradual demise of the liberal post-dissident elite. Dissidence in the form that first appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s in central and eastern Europe constituted a particular mode of political practice, combining open, non-violent dissent with universalist moral claims. The phenomenon of dissidentism was transnational, as political empowerment of oppositionists was achieved through a particular network of relationships between domestic audiences, repressive regimes, and Western media, social movements, trade unions, political parties, and policymakers. The specificities of the dissidents’ empowerment can partly explain key features of post-dissident politics and the visible backlash against former prominent dissidents, which has contributed to the rise of illiberalism and to democratic backsliding. This article traces the post-1989 trajectories of a few who belonged among central Europe’s most prominent representatives in this symbolic category, to try to explain the causes and character of the swift backlash against them—or as Václav Havel put it, their “expulsion from the fairytale.” Three pillars of dissident political power turned into the roots of their demise. First, critics question the dissidents’ uniqueness and rewrite their master narrative. Further, we see a clash of representations that results from the dissidents’ transnational empowerment, and third, the broader anti-elite and anti-intellectual tendencies that always accompanied dissidence as its shadow became amplified by more recent populist rhetoric.
Introduction
In the aftermath of the political transition often abbreviated as “1989,” central Europe saw a reshuffling of political elites, where those at the helm of the anti-regime, often anti-Communist, and—by 1989—predominantly liberal opposition were catapulted from formal irrelevance to positions of power. However, that post-dissident elite soon had to face growing societal reticence, at times even open hostility. Less than two decades after the regime change, much of their political power evaporated, along with the power of their heroic legend.
From afar, the fact that civil society leaders and public intellectuals who suddenly find themselves in the corridors of political power can get lost is perhaps not entirely surprising. After all, cycles of growing and fading electoral support are the salt of parliamentary democracies, which the post-dissident elite helped build. Other explanations of their demise emphasize the alleged incompatibility of the dissidents’ liberal ideas with what are by and large illiberal societies. 1 Finally, the pain of the economic transformation from Communism to a particularly crude variant of neoliberal market capitalism, which the post-dissident elite very often legitimized or even personified, has also been identified as a key cause. 2 However, what none of these hypotheses can explain is the depth and brutal character of the backlash against the dissidents’ moral regime, or the fact that they fell from the celestial stance of heroes and moral authorities to being ridiculed, like Václav Havel during and after his presidency, or even denounced and vilified as traitors, like Lech Wałęsa and Adam Michnik.
This paper argues that at least some of the anti-dissident tendencies that became visible in central European political life in the 1990s and then turned very prominent in the first decade of the new millenium can be explained by the character of political power that the post-dissident elite wielded, and that in turn needs to be linked to the way dissidents emerged during the Cold War era. To make my case, I shall abstract from individual characteristics of intellectuals and activists, and from the precise content of their ideas and political projects, to cast the “dissident” as a figure that operated independently from its initial designates.
In this essay, I define “dissidentism” as a particular form of transnational politics, and I theorize three components that, I argue, made the figure of the “dissident” possible: open and legal activism, domestic infamy/fame, and international recognition. I briefly trace how these three factors merged between the 1960s and 1980s and show the character of empowerment they carried for the oppositionists able to benefit from the dissident label. I then move on to an analysis of the post-1989 realities and the gradual decomposition of the dissident legacy, emphasizing the way in which the elements that were politically empowering for the opposition to Soviet Communism became a burden for the post-dissident elite—and a rallying cry for the growing numbers of their opponents.
What Makes a Dissident?
The word dissident comes from the Latin dissidere—“to sit on the side.” As the Polish poet Stanisław Barańczak pointed out, this etymology suggests being outside the mainstream, not necessarily in opposition to it, but deviating from the norm, acting in an unusual way, and staying on the margin. 3 The original meaning of the term dissident, drawing on medieval Latin, was synonymous to “heretic” or “renegade,” and it described a religious or theological position. 4 To borrow from Czesław Miłosz’s Captive Mind, which dissects intellectuals’ fascination with Marxism using theological language, if there is a Faith, there are those who experience and follow it uncritically and those who deviate or, on the contrary, argue that the mainstream has deviated from the actual meaning of the Scripture. It is in this religious sense that the word dissident first appeared in the English language in 1767. 5
The origins of the word dissident in its current usage almost certainly lie in the Anglophone media’s coverage of Soviet politics. Since about 1921, the word has been employed in the US press to describe opposition to the Communist Party mainstream. 6 Some secondary sources point to a moment after Stalin’s death in 1953 when “dissident” in this sense gained some popularity: “The term ‘dissident’ (in the sense that interests us) was coined in the West,” writes Krzysztof Pomian, “to describe the group of Soviet intellectuals arguing soon after 1956 for the deepening of the on-going Thaw, reaching further than the official Party line wanted to see it.” 7 According to this thesis, the first “dissidents” were also known as “revisionists.” The Soviet and later broadly speaking East European context is where we observe the shift from the original religious meaning of the word dissident and its deployment as a secular, political category (which is also due to the quasi-religious role of ideology in Soviet Communism at the time).
The Marxist connotation and religious rooting might explain the unease or even open hostility of some former oppositionists toward the new label that was used to describe them abroad. Václav Havel argued that the term was misleading and useless. With time, however, they began to see the value of the category, the empowerment it carried in transnational contacts. And later still, some began to use it as a positive element of self-understanding, like in Adam Michnik’s collection of essays tellingly entitled “The Confessions of a Converted Dissident”—consciously playing with three religiously charged words.
Although there are numerous understandings of the word dissident, what I call the “figure of the dissident” is primarily linked to a conception of a person as being involved in non-violent, open dissent, facing persecution for this, and his or her struggle being noticed by the authorities at home as well as some relevant and influential audience abroad. 8
If dissent is best understood as the “public and deliberate manifestation of political disagreement,” and dissidence is a form of politics that emerged in Eastern Europe in the 1960s, when individual acts of defiance met with disproportionate sanctions from the regime, dissidentism is a conceptual innovation on my part, which requires justification. 9 In his famous essay The Power of the Powerless, Havel speaks of a “specter haunting Eastern Europe” that goes beyond the practice of dissidence (to which he usually refers as “opposition” in the essay); this is dissidentism. 10 Havel describes the peculiar dynamics that occur on the tangent point between those practices in the East and their representations and interpretations in the West, emphasizing the inherently transnational nature of dissidentism and the selective way the “Western gaze” falls on some individuals and groups, elevating them to prominence, while remaining oblivious to others.
Dissidentism then is dissidence articulated through the “dissident” figure—dissidence in a transnational context and under a “Western gaze.” A “court of world opinion” outside the domestic box is necessary for the idea of the moral superiority of dissidence over the authoritarian regime to be developed. Adam Michnik argued that international attention turned individual defiance into political activism. 11 When “the West shines its spotlight [. . .] on a few isolated examples of protests and elevates them with the exalted names ‘dissident’ and ‘dissent’” it is, according to Jonathan Bolton, who develops his ideas in dialogue with Havel, “an example of Western journalists invoking a phenomenon that does not really exist, and thereby summoning it into existence.” 12
The selective and at times haphazard way in which Western media picked up some events in Eastern Europe as worthy of a story, thus elevating them to prominence and rendering them political, was problematic from the start. So was the way dissident texts were translated into Western languages. It was not merely a linguistic question. Translation was also a process of re-interpretation and bringing a text into a very different cultural and political context. From the late 1970s onwards, the Western audiences had certain expectations of Eastern European oppositionists, carried with the figure of the dissident. That applied to political manifestos, essays, but also literary output. Paul Wilson’s canonical translation of The Power of the Powerless begins with Havel’s paraphrase of The Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’” In the original, Havel uses the word disidentství, which is a clunky neologism best translated as “dissidentism.” 13 This first sentence already tunes the reader to Havel’s ironic distance to the dissident figure, a distance completely absent in the English version. Havel’s plays have been published and performed in the West not just, and perhaps even not primarily, because of their artistic merit, but because of the dissident aura. As Michelle Wood notes in her reconstruction of the plays’ career in the English-speaking world, their limited success was the result of “a fundamental misunderstanding of what his plays addressed: the notion that they were about dissident satire, which spoke to the needs of the English Cold War mindset, rather than the fact that they were about language as the ‘villain’ of the piece, which speaks to us all.” 14
Summing up my proposed conceptualization of dissidentism: there were three elements that were needed for it to come into being and for the figure of the dissident to become a source of political empowerment. The first is open, legal (i.e., not criminal), and non-violent dissent. The second is domestic recognition, that is, being noticed by the regime and at least to some extent by the local-national society at large. Third and crucially, the “Western gaze” —as the “court of world opinion” from the dissidents’ own point of view boiled down to the Cold War “West.” 15 In the remainder of this section, I trace each of the three elements before merging them in a “dissident triangle.”
Dissidence: Open, Legal, Non-Violent Dissent in the Face of Repression
What separated dissent from resistance was its purposefulness and openness. What dissidence added was the theory of non-violent action and an emphasis on legality. Dissidence was set in the gray zone between legality and illegality: it made claims in the legal sphere, although its goals were subversive. It questioned the existing order but tried to maintain the impression that it did not breach its rules. Many opposition activists in the Soviet bloc were well aware that this was, at least to some extent, a masquerade.
Their emphasis on legality and openness was coupled with non-violent action. This made dissidentism clearly distinct from all forms of resistance via armed rebellion and political terrorism—even if these were sometimes also embroidered with sophisticated-sounding intellectual justifications. The openness of dissent also contrasted it with clandestine, underground opposition. Only open and public activity could serve as a foundation for domestic and international recognition of dissidentism. At a more pragmatic level, open activity reduced the risks of “black propaganda”; if somebody’s activity is transparent and publicized, it is difficult to ridicule or criminalize.
But open dissent could emerge only after the end of Stalinism, which built its power on a combination of repression and an all-encompassing “surveillance state,” and once some margins for divergence from the Party line appeared in the second half of the 1950s. Unsurprisingly, the first dissenters were left-wing intellectuals and proponents of revisionist Marxism. The reason was not that they were somehow braver than those who had never converted to the “Marxist faith,” but that they possessed an ideological platform that allowed them openly to challenge the regime and that was not easy to criminalize and delegitimize as such. Dissidence soon emerged from the combination of such acts of dissent and the waves of repression that followed, showing the limits of what regimes were willing to tolerate for long.
Domestic Infamy/Fame
The other two factors were linked to the reception of the dissidents—domestically and internationally. While Communism refused to tolerate any challenge in the form of open dissent, it relied on the threat of that challenge to function and build its legitimation. As the longtime prime minister of the Polish People’s Republic, Józef Cyrankiewicz, famously exclaimed in the face of the 1956 worker’s rebellion in Poznań: Any provocateur or madman who dares raise his hand against the people’s government may be sure that the government will chop that hand off. For the sake of the working class, for the sake of the working peasantry and the intelligentsia, for the sake of the struggle for raising the living standard of society, for the sake of a further democratization of our life, for the sake of our Fatherland.
16
Totalitarianism needs an enemy, argued Hannah Arendt, distinguishing between two types: “objective enemies” of the totalitarian state who are hostile toward it and “potential enemies” selected on an ideological basis. These secretive, hypothetical enemies provide the rationale for the secret police, making them the key institution of a totalitarian state. 17
The post-totalitarian system that developed out of Cyrankiewicz’s totalitarianism emphasized order, stability, and “normality”—as in the names of the Polish post-Stalinist decade of “little stabilization” (mała stabilizacja) or the Czechoslovak “normalization” (normalizace) under Gustáv Husák. That post-totalitarian normalcy did not require the ritualized physical elimination of enemies. But it, too, needed villains—a menace. A threat to the order, a destabilizer of the system, and a deviant from the norm. This role was ascribed to the “dissident,” although the word itself was hardly used in Communist regimes’ formal communication.
The “dissident” is a troublemaker, a sort of defect in the system that thus becomes a reference point for its normal functioning. The “dissident” is used as an example of how not to behave, which shows the norm of “orderly practice.” 18 For that reason, other deviations from the norm, even explicitly non-political ones, become politicized. That is the story of the Czech “underground” rock music scene, with its most famous representatives, the Plastic People of the Universe, in whose name intellectual dissenters would protest, thus forming the foundations for the explicitly political and dissident Charter 77.
But apart from potential and anonymous enemies, the regime needed enemies with real names and faces—personalized opposition. Open action was a pre-condition for domestic fame, which in authoritarian regimes is often merely the flip side of officially sanctioned notoriety. Name-calling and scapegoating were meant to slander individuals and generate repulsion toward them. What this also did, unintentionally perhaps, was to create broader public awareness of the existence of dissident groups, their general goals, and their activities. Stigmatization as “public enemies” or “anti-socialist elements” informed the public of their general anti-systemic goals.
However, domestic slander campaigns would not have that flip effect, and perhaps would not have been so energetic, without alternative sources of information. Before samizdat press became an institution in the central and eastern Europe of the late 1970s and reached significant circulation in the 1980s, the only important channel was foreign radio, particularly the broadcasters oriented toward different countries of the Soviet bloc. 19 Without this counterpropaganda filling the very crude frame of domestic name recognition with actual content—what are the opposition groups, who are the people protesting, what do their open letters and proclamations actually say—the possibilities of creating any kind of a positive “legend” around dissidence would have been much bleaker.
The first moments where these two elements necessary for dissidentism occurred took place in the 1960s. They were to intensify in the second half of the 1970s. What was still largely missing in the 1970s was international attention beyond political divisions. The first signs of a new framework emerging were the 1968 trials of Soviet dissenters who employed the language of rights, and received significant Western media coverage across the political spectrum. 20
Transnational Networks, International Audiences, Western Empowerment
In central and eastern Europe, the transnational contacts of the opposition were first established roughly in the 1960s, but broader recognition across the Iron Curtain was achieved only once ideological divisions were transcended through the common idiom of human rights. International recognition amplified domestic recognition. More importantly, it empowered domestic dissidence and allowed it to use much greater leverage against the regimes through what Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink famously called “the boomerang model.” 21 Having a universalist benchmark in the form of human rights allowed the dissenters to take the moral high ground, delegitimizing repression and ultimately undermining the legitimacy of the Communist states as such.
By late 1970s, all three factors that combined to make the dissidents as we know them were in place. It was the opposition in central Europe that connected these most dynamically, allowing for a new transnational actor to materialize—the dissident. Dissidentism was then a specific form of transnationally nested societal opposition. The deeply moral (not only legalistic) narratives of “prominent dissidents” constituted them as global moral and political authorities until 1989 and far beyond.
Biographic Trajectories of Former Dissidents: An Attempted Typology
The empowerment of the “dissident triangle” of factors discussed above peaked during the peaceful handover of power in 1989. The emblematic story here is that of Havel’s ascent to Prague Castle and international political celebrity status, but leadership positions were saturated with former oppositionists across the region. That moment of glory did not last long. Can we say that the empowerment of dissidence was so short-lived? Or do we perhaps need to nuance the notion of “waging power”?
“The ‘dissident movement’ [. . .] did not last,” claims Jacques Rupnik, asserting that “within a couple of years” central Europe witnessed the rapid marginalization of former dissidents and their eclipse from political life.” 22 We could agree with this judgment if we reduced the dissident legacy to the direct influence of post-dissident political formations, rooted in the brief moment of change. Born during the run-up to or in the transition itself, such organizations as the Czechoslovak Civic Forum and Public against Violence, the Polish Civic Committees, or the Hungarian Democratic Forum and the Alliance of Free Democrats indeed ran out of political fuel and societal legitimacy early in the 1990s.
However, such a perspective is based on a thin view of politics, and it excludes the pluralism, multiplicity, and fluidity of post-dissident biographies. In fact, post-dissident politics still maintains a grip on central and eastern European political debates, although in ways that are not always easy to capture. Post-dissident political influence was not merely direct but involved the hegemony of its master narrative of Communism, its demise, and the future of central European societies. The channels through which both direct and symbolic power was exercised were different, and we need to take a closer look at post-dissident biographies to capture these.
First of all, the biographic trajectories of former oppositionists and dissidents are quite varied. At the risk of offering a rather crude typology, I would suggest that there were four main paths that such people could follow in the aftermath of the collapse of Communism. The first was openly political: it involved taking up positions of power or at least joining or even establishing political parties. If we look at the biographies of many current mainstream politicians in central Europe, we quickly notice that even if this path is taken only as an illustration of dissent’s political legacy, Rupnik is wrong in suggesting that there was an eclipse of post-dissident politics in the 1990s. In Poland, the current prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki (son of one of the most notorious anti-Communist dissenters), the leaders of the largest political parties, Jarosław Kaczyński and Donald Tusk, many ministers and key parliamentary opposition figures all share “dissident” experience as a common biographical stem. The same is true of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and the core group that established and has largely run his party, as well as several key political personalities in the Czech Republic today.
What Rupnik’s thesis exemplifies is perhaps the collapse of a post-1989 dream of triumphant dissident liberalism, nested in the idea of “Central Europe” that many dissident intellectuals were strategically constructing throughout the 1980s, alongside the narrative of a “return to Europe” that emerged so powerfully during the transition. 23 This collapse was visible across the region, with the gradual demise of post-dissident liberalism in Hungary, 24 the Czech Republic, 25 and Poland. 26 The same can be said of dissident “heretical geopolitics”—a program for revising the European order that was abandoned as early as the first half of the 1990s. 27
The second path was that of “public intellectuals,” men (yes, in the patriarchic context of central European dissent, almost exclusively men) of letters—a path that seemingly fits the dissident figure best and is most clearly exemplified by Adam Michnik in Poland or János Kis and György Konrád in Hungary, as well as a plethora of internationally perhaps less renowned, but domestically equally resonant intellectuals. 28
The third path involved the contestation of the political and socio-economic choices made by central and eastern European states after 1989. Once a dissident, always a dissident. It is a path of anti-systemic “new dissidentism,” drawing equally often on radical leftist and radical rightist ideas. An example is the Polish left-wing activist Piotr Ikonowicz. A veteran of the Solidarity trade union and the Freedom and Peace movement, he stood firmly by his socialist beliefs during and after the transformation, and following a formally political phase (two terms in parliament), he returned to grassroots activism very much resembling the practices of the Workers’ Defense Committee in the 1970s, albeit targeted at a different system now—that of capitalist exploitation and societal indifference.
Finally, the fourth and last path involves resigning from any sort of public engagement and looking instead for a career, for example, in the business sector or in academia, without “public” pretense.
What this typology should not obscure is that the choice of any of these paths was not necessarily final and binding. In fact, many post-dissident biographies over the last thirty years visibly indicate that one person could very well assume two or three “roles,” often starting in politics, then returning to “private” life or contestation, only to re-emerge in yet another role. Biographical research on the former oppositionists is still a large historical lacuna to be filled, and it is related to the broader need to treat the 1990s and even the early years of the succeeding decade as a historical period rooted in and overlapping with the Communist experience and the transformation.
The paths of former dissidents after the fall of Communism were quite varied. Two activists who benefited from transnational empowerment to different degrees were Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa. The latter, a trade unionist and the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was by far a more recognized opposition leader by 1989 than his Czechoslovak counterpart. Yet in 1989–90, both Havel and Wałęsa became presidents of their countries. Whereas the Czech intellectual remained in the presidential seat for thirteen years, the Polish labor legend did not manage to get re-elected even once. The post-Solidarity political elites lost their authority rapidly, and by 1993 Poland saw the return to power of the post-Communist left. There was much that was their own fault in that spectacular decline. But there was also something else—an involuntary component that, I argue, can be blamed on the implicit characteristics of the dissident figure.
One of the most recognized dissidents of his generation, and an important intellectual behind Poland’s opposition initiatives since the late 1960s, Adam Michnik became (and as of 2024 still is) the editor-in-chief of central Europe’s largest left-liberal daily, Gazeta Wyborcza. He chose the path of the public intellectual in a prominent position of (indirect) power instead of a political career, although he did serve one term in parliament after the 1989 elections. Unarguably, he became one of the most influential persons in the country—and one of the most criticized ones, too. 29 Because of that, “the Polish language does not know an insult that was not thrown to Michnik’s face, neither does it know any words of praise that he has not received.” 30
His older friend and longtime co-activist, Jacek Kuroń, widely viewed since the mid-1960s as the co-author of the first real dissident publication, the “Open Letter to the Party,” was minister of labor and later social policy in the post-Solidarity governments. He would later assess the early 1990s as the gravest mistake of his entire life—being persuaded by the “there is no alternative” neoliberal arguments to betray his leftist ideals for almost a decade. Only shortly before his death in 2004 did Kuroń return to his “roots” and voice clear support for the new incarnation of the values that he had expressed so passionately before—the alter-globalist movement.
Kuroń’s friend and the “Open Letter’s” co-author, Karol Modzełewski, on the other hand, was one of the few prominent dissidents who stood by his ideals firmly during the transition, holding on to what he called the “life-giving impulse of hooliganism.” 31 In any case, the initial shift in ideological positions that tended to bring them much closer to the Western mainstream caused widespread disappointment and criticism from the dissidents’ former allies among the independently minded in the West and among many activists in their own countries. 32 Modzełewski famously quipped, with a touch of bitterness regarding his former friends’ choices, that he “didn’t sit eight and a half years in jail to build capitalism.” 33
Expulsion from the Fairytale: How the Features of Dissident Power Led to Post-Dissident Demise
Paradoxically, having become globally recognized moral and political authorities not only did not improve the reception of the dissidents’ activities in their countries after 1989, but it also made it worse. Havel’s words turned out to be prophetical: “People secretly hate the dissidents. They’ve become their bad conscience, their living reproach! That’s how they see the dissidents.[. . .] This is why they never miss an opportunity to smear the dissidents.” 34 Clearly, by the end of the 1990s, critique of the former dissidents was outweighing their domestic popularity. Havel, whose story during late socialism truly resembled a fairytale, in which a declassed prince struggles against evil and has to go through prison to become king, before the end of his presidency spoke of a “hard fall to the earth” from a “fairy-tale” world. 35
Havel was not exaggerating. That backlash against the dissidents took place all over central Europe, and the attacks came from very different sides. The spectacular rise to celebrity, power, and glory was followed by an equally spectacular fall. Michnik arguably received the hardest blows. His supposedly “manipulative” political nature was (in)famously disclosed in several books and pamphlets, of which one, entitled “Michnikness” (Michnikowszczyzna), authored by the conservative publicist Rafał Ziemkiewicz, a representative of the “new anti-Communists,” was probably the most vicious. 36 But equally strong attacks came from former friends, “second rank” opposition figures who were apparently now eager to disclose the truth about the treacherous pact between Communists and dissidents. Representative of this trend was the political novel Valley of Nothingness, penned by Bronisław Wildstein, in which Michnik’s fictional alter ego—the editor in-chief Bogatyrowicz—is depicted as a partly loathsome, partly demonic figure, a power-abusing cynical rapist. 37 In the face of such a plethora of vehement criticisms, Michnik began to turn to the dissident label as a positive form of self-description, although the word rarely appeared in his writings before 1989. 38 It was as if he wanted to call upon the transnational resonance of the idea and the moral as well as political empowerment its representation could bring.
The canonization of former dissidents and their own self-descriptions, historiographical contributions, and mythmaking all had important impacts on these trajectories and the reactions of other social groups and parts of the elite. Among those who were excluded from the “dissident club” were those who did not fit either because of earlier political choices or attitudes (like post-Communists or more radical, often nationalist, activists) or because of their biographies (those who took active part in the anti-regime opposition and those who did not, although the difference turned out to be unclear) and generational differences (i.e., people too young to catch the “dissident train”).
An important process that ran parallel to canonization and was often used to challenge the esteem and authority of former dissidents was lustration. 39 It provided tools of internal warfare within the post-dissident political camp, which in many cases proved more brutal than the battle across the post-dissident/post-Communist cleavage. Beyond that, former dissidents, particularly those who had already achieved considerable international status and celebrity in the 1980s, which only increased in the 1990s—Havel, Konrád, etc.—were also involved in a peculiar transnational setup that may have brought them authority and recognition but also contributed to domestic controversies.
Apart from inevitable political differences between the predominantly social democratic and liberal “prominent dissidents” and their conservative critics, the critique of former dissidents can be divided into three main themes, each aligning with one “tip” of the dissident triangle. The first line of criticism challenged the uniqueness of open dissidence as a privileged and legitimate form of societal opposition and stretched the meaning of opposition to all forms of “resistance to Communism.” The other line targeted the dissidents’ transnational empowerment as a form of detachment from domestic realities. The main gist of a third critique followed anti-elitist and anti-intellectual tropes and directly targeted their domestic status.
If Everyone Was a Victim, Was Everyone a Dissident?
As explained above, dissidence emerged from open dissent and met with the threat of repression or actual persecution. Members of the different central and eastern European opposition movements had direct experiences with secret police surveillance, sometimes violence, and harassment, and they often knew what a prison looked like from the inside. Though in dissident historical narratives of Communism these are all important themes, it was not difficult for the average citizen of a central European state born after World War II to perceive these experiences as somewhat exotic. As Jonathan Bolton aptly observed, the dissidents’ own experience of Communism “was, by any measure, unusual.” 40
Nevertheless, the dominant post-1989 narrative of the Communist era became the dissident one. The memory of dissent overwrote post-dissident history and became the hegemonic narrative in the historiography of regime-society relations during Communism as well as the transition.
41
This narrative was founded on one term that the dissidents instrumentalized for their purposes already in the 1970s: totalitarianism. Robert Brier and Piotr Wciślik have reconstructed the way totalitarianism came to be used as a morally charged though visibly inaccurate description of realities under Communist regimes—a term used to mobilize support for the opposition.
42
After 1989, the use and abuse of the term backfired, as it helped to create an image of Communism detached from ordinary experiences and real social history, but which was easily adaptable to new and growing anti-Communist rhetoric. Shortly after the revolution and regaining freedom a peculiar kind of anti-Communist frenzy spread. As if some people, who were silent for years . . . suddenly felt the need to relieve their past humiliation or their feeling of failure through some powerful gesture. That is why they targeted those who were the last to point it out—that is the dissidents. All the time they were seeing them as remorse, as an example that if someone did not want to subordinate himself fully, he did not have to do so. It is interesting that in those days, when the dissident seemed to be a group of crazy Don Quixotes, aversion for them was not as visible as it became when history had proven them right. That was too much, that was unforgivable! And the more it became evident that the dissidents do not reproach anyone and do not accuse anyone (and God forbid, should they give themselves as an example), paradoxically, the more the anger rose. In the end, some new anti-Communist was madder with them than he was with the representatives of the old regime.
43
The new abuse of the totalitarianism concept began to be coupled with relativizing the dissident experience. The logic was as follows: if the regime was totalitarian, everyone was a victim. If it was held up only by police terror and surveillance, then it was never legitimate. If it was illegitimate and everyone knew it, the entire society resented and resisted it, in one way or another, throughout their lives. There was no major qualitative difference between even the smallest form of individual resistance and dissidence as a conscious and sustained political practice. If anything, dissidence was possible only for those who were protected by some special umbrella, so the argument continues, either by the international spotlight or their suspiciously close relationship with the Communist regime. The fact that less known activists or rank-and-file working-class unionists indeed often faced harsher repression, or that non-Communist enemies of the system, like several Catholic priests in Poland (the best known among them being Father Jerzy Popiełuszko) were murdered in a display of political violence more reminiscent of Latin American “Operation Condor” than of central Europe, further reinforces this notion.
Questioning the legitimacy former oppositionists derive from their experience of dissidence can thus challenge its specificity but also the intentions behind it, thereby undermining a major moral foundation of dissent, which was acting for the common good. The resulting counter-narrative is that of “a small, privileged micro-society of professional grumblers [. . .] caught up in their moral superiority.” 44 It takes an especially powerful form in Poland, where at least ten million people openly joined an opposition organization in the 1980s, and many others who may have been too young to do so joined the youth opposition or countercultural initiatives in the second half of that decade. 45
To be sure, many former “prominent dissidents” are eager to romanticize their militant biographies and depict them as unique, often to mute dissenting voices from other and younger groups with different life stories. This has even led some intellectuals who otherwise hold the legacy of dissidence in high esteem to call for annulling the post-dissident privilege as a bargaining chip in contemporary political discussions. Jarosław Kuisz, the editor in chief of the socio-political weekly Kultura Liberalna, which openly acknowledges its rooting in the dissident legacy, explains that since the partitions and national uprisings of the nineteenth century, Poland’s political imagination has been captivated by a “subordination mindset” constructed around the existential fear for an independent state and national community. Kuisz argues that the former dissidents, despite their unquestionable merit, are also carriers of that mindset, which in the contemporary realities of democratic politics in an EU member state are, however, destructive and divisive. Hence his appeal to put an “end to the subordination generations” and to pass the baton in the political relay to a younger generation, the first in over two hundred years to grow up without the need to cast politics in terms of good and evil. 46
Finally, the post-dissident tendency to exaggerate and thereby misuse big words like “dictatorship” or “totalitarianism” has recently backfired during the harsh conflicts within the former opposition political camp, especially in Poland. The liberal resistance to illiberal backsliding and the populist government of the Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) party, launched by the Democracy Defense Committee (Komitet Obrony Demokracji, KOD), has purposefully used references to the martial law declared in 1981 and depicted PiS rule as a “dictatorship.” 47 This helped stir up some domestic and international support, but the archaic and exaggerated language imported from Solidarity has largely alienated younger supporters, who tend to perceive KOD as “the boomers’ last stand.”
As such, even though KOD has employed the legacy of dissidence as a positive reference, it has contributed to its exhaustion as a trademark of the “subordination mindset,” in Kuisz’s terminology—that is, a prescription for political action that is wholly rooted in a situation of incomplete national sovereignty and casts political struggles in Manichean, existential terms. 48
Imported Power
An even graver sin of the “dissident elite” was apparently its international empowerment. According to their mostly conservative and nationalist critics, this, too, had more than one dimension. One was a kind of alienation manifested in detachment from domestic realities. The other was the selective nature of international empowerment, which could fuel many conspiracy theories.
The first accusation can be illustrated symbolically by two literary examples from former dissidents’ oeuvre. Milan Kundera, a main advocate of the central European cultural “cause,” acknowledged and digested the defeat many other former “dissidents” failed to grasp. In his novel Ignorance, one of the main characters, named Irena, returns from forced exile in Paris to her native Czech Republic. 49 She throws a party and wishes to please her guests with French red wine. The evening turns out to be a clash of the idealized image of her nation with reality, symbolized by the simple drinking rituals. The Czech women refuse to drink Irena’s sophisticated French wine, ostentatiously pouring beer into themselves in big, profane mouthfuls. In Kundera’s depiction, the dichotomy is stark: on one hand, somewhat artificial European sophistication, on the other, tradition—simple and down-to-earth. Irena has been naive to act against the “natural way” things are. Beer-swallowing is like all the other characteristics of local popular identities that have been naively overlooked by the Westward-looking wine-sippers. 50 The attempt to make Czech working-class women sip French wine was, according to Kundera, doomed to fail. Was imposing liberal, intellectual ideals on entire central European societies equally hopeless?
This fictional scene illustrates the side-effects of dissidentism, namely the mismatch between wide transnational acclaim and actual domestic impact. Bolton asks about the real nature of the dissidents’ public—who was their true audience? He argues that dissident writing straddled two spaces: “the space of a universal public, open to all interested parties, and that of a bounded public, theoretically open but also defined by particular customs, values, and goals.” 51 The central European intellectuals who were cast in the roles of “prominent dissidents” let themselves be tricked by the transnational fame they acquired, giving them a certain form of power that they could use against their regimes. With this fame and this power, they could perceive themselves as “spokespersons of society” and emerge as leaders and advisors in the newly established democracies. 52 They could not, however, succeed with their project in the long run.
When anti-politics turned political again, former dissidents had to discover that there were not that many people who supported them. In fact, they were becoming quite lonely. Central Europe was politically incorporated into the West, but no “moral rebirth” of the nations occurred. It seems that the localization of liberal values for which the dissidents struggled did not reach as deeply as they assumed. Ethnic hatred, nationalism, and xenophobia were not defeated by the myth of a multicultural central Europe, which, as Kundera claimed, required maximum diversity in minimum space. Historical wounds have not been healed here, although dialogue among Czechs, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Hungarians, Slovaks, Russians, and others was one of the “dissidents’” main desires. These developments in central Europe coincided with a more general crisis of human rights as the universal moral language, first launched by Asian autocracies in the late 1990s and later from within the West as a reaction to the human rights rhetoric of neoconservative politicians as a justification for warmongering.
It was also a painful experience to discover that the “dissidents” were not in fact a synecdoche for their societies, but more of a circumscribed minority. In 1968, 1980, and 1989, that was difficult to foresee. But along with political freedom came disillusionments and sad reflections. Looking for elements of their own Self within the East European Other, fueled by their “dreams and desires,” Western intellectuals and experts were also constructing a political reality for which they wished—downplaying the role of oppositional groups that did not fit the dissident figure smoothly. 53 That transnational mechanism was, in the 1990s, disclosed at the local, domestic level. More and more critics started asking, “why are they so famous and acclaimed?” In other words, the fall of the dissidents was a result of a clash of representations.
With time, the mechanics of transnational empowerment became more discernable, and this led to challenges both from those parts of civil society that were excluded—mostly conservative, not fitting a liberal mold—and from states with authoritarian and illiberal ambitions. The former resulted from, or at least coincided with, the growing realization that the West supported dissidence not only or even primarily because it helped in “winning the Cold War,” but also due to cultural affinities. 54 Already in the 1960s contacts developed between radical left youth in central and western Europe, in the 1970s the newly formed human rights movements found allies across the Iron Curtain, and in the 1980s new opposition groups were aligned with and befriended groups of independent activists and greens. 55 Very often that was a spontaneous reaction of likeminded people sharing an activist mindset and specific generational experiences. At other times, it was purely instrumental, as when some members of the Polish “Freedom and Peace” movement took on nuclear energy, thinking that “those Western peaceniks will love it.” 56
The realization that there is a human factor in international politics was surprisingly late in coming. When the “Law and Justice” party came to power for the first time in 2005, the international shaming campaign against it had significant impact on domestic politics. It was still possible to argue that “Western public opinion” was criticizing the Polish government for this or that policy. That shaming, combined with unseen domestic anti-government mobilization and a miscalculation on the part of the PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński, eventually resulted in snap elections in 2007, which the incumbent lost.
However, when PiS won a parliamentary majority for a second time in 2015, the awareness of transnational media campaigns was much greater. The former dissident Zbigniew Romaszewski’s daughter, Agnieszka—who was heading Poland’s twenty-first century version of Radio Free Europe, Belsat TV, broadcasting to Belarus—was quite outspoken about the personal ties of former oppositionists and certain Western media outlets, which were then used for partisan purposes. The PiS-appointed minister of culture, sociologist, and former environmental movement activist Piotr Gliński would in turn criticize the liberal model of civil society support, which empowered some forms of activism and groups while excluding others as Western donors saw fit.
A specific understanding of the importance of transnational networks indeed informed the anti-NGO, illiberal policies of several governments in the region. Vladimir Putin’s Russia was first to declare foreign-financed NGOs “enemies of the state” and thus illegal. In 2017, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government in Hungary introduced a law that required all NGOs receiving financial support from abroad to register as “foreign-supported organizations,” threatening them with closure in case of non-compliance. 57 Similar policy initiatives were launched in Poland, where the PiS government over two terms sought to control not only domestic but also international financing schemes, boost its alternative civil society organizations, and theorize about the way international reputation could be controlled. The sociologist Andrzej Zybertowicz, an advisor to presidents Kaczyński and Duda, coined the notion of MaBeNa—the Machine for Narrative Security (Maszyna Bezpieczeństwa Narracyjnego)—an institutionalized mechanism for diffusing the threat of international shaming.
Anti-Elite Backlash
Already in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, as prominent dissident intellectuals and activists gained transnational recognition, they met with a degree of reticence and even hostility at home. This phenomenon is closely linked to the international popularity of a historical grand narrative regarding the fall of Communism in which the intellectual dissidents played a crucial role. These narratives, as already noted, were challenged by groups and categories of oppositionists who are excluded from them.
The ensuing controversies in Poland are focused on the role of dissident elites in the emergence of Solidarity, which the anti-dissident writers downplay, arguing instead that the union was an organic, worker-driven protest movement, rooted in traditions of national independence and Catholicism. They also focus on the transition negotiated with the Communists at the Round Table, which in turn is exaggerated, to make the pragmatic deal between opposition mainstream and reform Communists look conspiratorial and to hide the involvement of present-day right-wing politicians who also sat at the table. What connected the anti-dissident narratives that became powerful were clear elements of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism.
As we have seen, the opposition’s experience of Communism was unusual. The intensity of contacts with the Party elite, resulting from dissent, together with other factors, such as having similar social backgrounds or misinformation by the secret police, were already fueling conspiracy theories in the 1980s. These gained additional momentum when the critique of dissenters began to outweigh admiration for them.
According to those theories, the regime shifts of 1989 were all staged by some kind of broader, hidden machinations. And so, the Polish and Hungarian negotiations are depicted as an arrangement between the Communists and the left-wing intellectuals, designed to divide power and influence, with the security service steering it all from the back seat. The already mentioned and important PiS-linked intellectual, Andrzej Zybertowicz—a sociologist known for giving conspiratorial thinking academic credentials—quotes one Solidarity unionist’s view that the Round Table talks were a moment when “the Communists shared power with their own agents.” 58
Similarly, the Czechoslovak “Velvet Revolution” gets portrayed as the result of a plot. “Charter 77 was no opposition, merely a discussion club,” claimed the Czech film director Petr Zelenka. “Those people were not in a position to take power in the state.[. . .] A revolution has to be organized, and in my view this one was organized, but by someone else than is usually assumed.” “By whom?” asked Zelenka’s interviewer, Aleksander Kaczorowski. “By the Russians,” replied Zelenka. “One hundred percent sure.” 59 A former Chartist and later fringe right politician, Petr Cibulka, claimed that Havel “is not really the person that is presented by the mass media. I have a very serious suspicion that he works for the Russian military intelligence—GRU.” 60 And so, Havel’s surprisingly quick ascent to power at the end of 1989 is “explained” by reference to secret service machinations, putting the “largely unknown” playwright in the place where Alexander Dubček, the hero of the Prague Spring, would have been. 61
The anti-elitism inherent to these historical counternarratives has deeper roots, going back to the emergence of dissidence in the 1970s. Let us look at another literary illustration. In his famous play Audience, Havel confronts his literary alter ego Vaněk with the ambiguous persona of the brewmaster, the representative of “the people” and the working class. Sitting in the brewmaster’s office, Vaněk is invited to drink a morning beer with the host. “Drink up! Why ain’t you drinkin’?” asks the brewmaster. “Thank you, but I’m not used to drinking beer,” responds the declassed playwright. “You’d rather be sippin’ a little wine, wouldn’tcha? [. . .] Here you’re gonna get used to drinkin’ beer. We all drink beer here, everybody—it’s kind of like a tradition [. . .].” 62 Beer and wine confront one another again.
This time, beer grows to become a symbol of “simple” values and life, while wine stands for a certain elitism. But combined with the context of the play, the two stand for more than that. The scene becomes the clash of the intelligentsia and the working class—a topic prominent in dissident self-reflection as well as Communist anti-dissident propaganda. The dissident figure, with its transnational origins and creation, gives that issue an additional component.
An attempted revival of different roots and alternative heroes of the Solidarity movement by the journalist Zbigniew Branach is symptomatic here. Branach targets what he calls the “myth of the founding fathers”—that is, the thesis that the KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotników, Workers’ Defense Committee) intellectual opposition had a key influence on the politicization of the 1980 strikes and the resulting creation of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity.” 63 While his arguments are well grounded and the story told is quite plausible, what strikes the reader is the power of the author’s anti-intellectual resentment. Branach writes of the “regulars of exclusive salons and trendy cafés of the capital city” as well as the “holders of foreign universities’ scholarships and students of closed academic seminars” who—naturally—“knew the people of physical labor only indirectly.” 64 Who exactly is meant by those insinuations remains unclear because the depiction does not match any KOR activist. But the counter-myth holds. The idea of an elite “salon” is a recurring trope in the works of Wildstein and Ziemkiewicz—themselves prominent public intellectuals and the regulars of “salons,” albeit different ones.
Only an external observer, though one closely linked to the Polish context, was able to dissect the “defeat of Solidarity” and that of the dissidents in more analytical terms. David Ost importantly notes that Solidarity was not so much a working-class movement as a rebellion of the “working intelligentsia” (engineers, lower rank technocrats, and qualified workers). 65 In this light, the war between the “salons” seems to be an internal struggle of the intelligentsia in the broad sense of the word and not, as the anti-dissident camp would have it, a struggle for “objective truth” and “historical justice.”
Symptomatically, Branach calls the dissidents “prominent characters [. . .] used to playing leading roles,” whose opposition legend was coined with the help of Radio Free Europe and the likes of Timothy Garton Ash. 66 This claim is not to be lightly dismissed, as it carries more than a grain of truth. As other scholars—including this author—have noted, the dominant historiography of central European dissent is indeed highly selective, focusing on particular dates, 67 movements, 68 and people. 69 Although Branach acknowledges the grassroots work of KOR, its link to the working classes was “unsuccessful,” which allegedly “frustrated the activists of this organization.” 70
Conclusion
When we look at the critical arguments launched against post-dissident intellectuals and politicians, they may sound familiar. Many of the tropes we find there are more or less conscious clichés established in Communist propaganda during the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. The emergence of such counternarratives is not surprising, if we bear in mind that dissidentism rested on transnational empowerment, which drew on transnational channels of communication, international recognition, and the subversive use of domestic infamy.
In that sense, the historical decline of the dissidents was inherently contained in the dissident figure that provided the political empowerment of the opposition. The legalistic and moralizing language of human rights, which constituted the basis of dissidence and the lingua franca allowing for the articulation of Eastern European struggles in a globally understandable manner, drew on an anti-political vision of state–civil society relations which made it difficult for post-dissident liberal politicians to capture either the economic grievances or the emotional griefs of societies undergoing a rapid transition. 71 Domestic recognition of certain leading figures began to be challenged by former opposition figures who did not reach similar prominence under Communism, but were either closer to their social base or were able to portray themselves as such, leading to the diffusion of the Manichean, populist distinction between a post-dissident liberal “elite” and the “people.” Finally, transnational entanglements, once a source of power and national pride, became a burden when the geopolitical imaginary of a “return to Europe” lost its hegemonic role. Taken together, the three pillars of dissident political power were turned into the roots of their demise.
